
Arrow Video
4K UHD Release: January 14, 2025
Video: 2.40:1/2160p (HDR10)/Color
Audio: English/German/French/Italian Hybrid DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH
Run Time: 152:59
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Narrowly escaping the massacre of her entire family by the SS, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) flees to Paris and forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema. Meanwhile, a guerilla band of Jewish-American soldiers known as ‘The Basterds’ led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) are waging a bloody war of attrition behind enemy lines, but Europe remains beneath Nazi bootheels. Believing themselves unstoppable, the leaders of the Third Reich assemble in Paris for the premiere of propaganda epic Nation's Pride. The location? Shosanna's cinema. With all the rotten eggs in one basket, The Basterds join forces with British Commando Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German film star/undercover allied agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) to infiltrate the premiere. Their plan? Blow up the basket… (From Arrow’s official synopsis)

Inglourious Basterds is, with all due respect to his mostly fantastic filmography, Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece. It is a perfect distillation of his ethos, his love of cult films, and his insatiable need to share and recontextualize those films. It’s clever, funny, suspenseful, visceral, and spectacularly well-crafted. As a cult genre enthusiast myself, I, like many others, originally assumed that Inglourious Basterds was going to be a Men on a Mission war film in the tradition of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone (1961). Afterall, Tarantino borrowed the title from Enzo G. Castellari's Dirty Dozen-alike The Inglorious Bastards (1978). There is an element of that in the title characters themselves, but they are actually part of an ensemble and, in many ways, supporting players in the larger struggle between Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna Dreyfus and Christoph Waltz’ Standartenführer Hans Landa.
The Italian film fan in me realized that, instead of making a Enzo Castellari meatball action spectacular, Tarantino was actually perfecting his take on Sergio Leone’s episodic epic style of filmmaking. Inglourious Basterds’ tone, shape, and pacing specifically reminds me of Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West, 1968), something I think the film owes to the input of editor Sally Menke. Menke takes what could’ve been an unwieldy series of episodic moments and pulls them together into a soundly-structured whole. For further evidence as to the significance of her input, look no further than Tarantino’s next two films, Django Unchained (2009) and Hateful Eight (2015) – both foundationally messy films of varying quality that also owe an acknowledged debt to spaghetti westerns and were released after the editor’s untimely death. If I’m considering Inglourious Basterds Tarantino's masterpiece, I need to also consider it Menke’s.

Video
Arrow has been teasing an Inglourious Basterds release for years now and some folks think the delay may be related to the curious case of the 2021 Universal 4K UHD’s transfer, which was taken from an upscaled 2K digital intermediate source. I’m just a simple midwestern cult movie fan, but it seems insane to me that a physical film fetishist like Tarantino wouldn’t have a chemically color-timed 35mm print. Perhaps I just don’t understand the ins & outs of the industry and how the digital intermediate pipeline worked in 2009. Regardless, Arrow has finally verified that their 2160p transfer was supplied directly by Universal, including the same HDR10 upgrades.
Having caught wind of the controversy that surrounded Universal’s disc, I held off on buying it, so I don’t have a copy on-hand for a direct comparison, not that I could get screencaps off of a 4K disc, anyway. I’m also not bothering to go through the effort of comparing screencaps from Arrow’s same day Blu-ray, from which the images on this page were taken, to the original Universal Blu-ray, because the differences are, to my eyes, imperceptible when shrunk down and compressed to the .JPG format.
Instead, I’m taking it as a given that this is essentially the exact same transfer with perhaps slightly different encoding and will quickly wrap up this already overlong part of the review with a description of what I see. The biggest complaint I read concerning the original transfer and, thus, this one, wasn’t resolution, but the over-brightness. I suppose I have to admit that there are some blown-out whites throughout, especially when compared to the 1080p footage seen in the extra features, but I still like the overall dynamic range. I also caught a bit of that shimmery effect that often occurs when transfers are oversharpened, which may be an issue with the upscale, but there aren’t notable edge haloes or other digital artifacts.

Audio
Inglourious Basterds is presented in its original 5.1 sound and uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio. The whole thing sounds as crisp and lively as the earlier Blu-rays and is more or less how I remember it sounding in cinemas.
Tarantino’s collage approach to soundtrack curation might also have peaked here. He doesn’t let genre type or time period get in the way of a good pick, from obvious choices, like Ennio Morricone’s “The Verdict (La condanna)” from Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (Italian: La Resa dei Conti, 1966) – arguably the maestro’s most underappreciated western score – to the brilliant leftfield recontextualization of David Bowie and Girogio Moroder’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” from Paul Schrader’s 1982 film of the same name. The “Cat People” scene is particularly fun, because if you weren’t aware of the song’s full title and history, you’d swear Bowie and Moroder wrote it specifically for Inglourious Basterds.

Extras
Disc 1 (4K UHD)
Commentary with Tim Lucas – The Video Watchdog editor and author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (Video Watchdog, 2007) has recorded what I believe is the first commentary track for a Quentin Tarantino movie since the Artisan Entertainment Reservoir Dogs (1992) DVD, which had an aggregated interview track (unless you consider movies that he wrote or got a special credit for, like Sin City [2005]). Lucas supplies the brand of even-toned, well-researched, fact-filled track we’ve come to expect from his Bava commentaries, including detailed descriptions of the works that inspired Inglourious Basterds, the origins of its soundtrack, its connections to other films, and the history surrounding its events.
Disc 2 (Blu-ray)
WWSD: What Would Sally Do? (11:08, HD) – Assistant editor and Sally Menke replacement Fred Raskin chats about his early film fandom, schooling (including a clip from his college film), breaking into the industry, hooking up and collaborating with Menke, cutting Inglourious Basterds, and some of his other work with Tarantino and James Gunn.
Doom Struck: Confessions of a Basterd (11:24, HD) – Actor Omar Doom discusses his interest in music and various musical projects over the years (including clips), and talks about developing a relationship with Tarantino.
Blood Fiction (22:12, HD) – Makeup effects supervisor extraordinaire Greg Nicotero (the ‘N’ in KNB Effects) breaks down the production of the effects, from concept to test/rehearsals and execution.
Making It Right: The Kindness of Tarantino (22:04, HD) – Walter Chaw, the critic and author of A Walter Hill Film (MZS Press, 2023), discusses the inherent kindness of Tarantino’s work – the impulse that led him to rewrite history in Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), which is usually obfuscated by his love of violence and irony.
Film History on Fire (19:49, HD) – Historian, curator, and critic Pamela Hutchinson explores Inglourious Basterds’ filmic heritage and the political, spiritual, and literal weaponization of film.
Filmmaking in Occupied France (15:42, HD) – Christine Letaux, the author of Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) rounds off the Arrow exclusive extras with a look at the historical French film industry during the WWII occupation.

2009 archival extras:
Roundtable discussion with Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, and critic Elvis Mitchell (30:47, HD)
Nation's Pride (6:13, HD) – Eli Roth’s complete film-within-the-film.
The Making of Nation's Pride (4:02, HD)
The Original Inglorious Bastards (7:41, HD) – A quick look at Enzo G. Castellari’s original film with Roth and Inglorious Bastards star Bo Svenson, including archival behind-the-scenes footage.
A Conversation with Rod Taylor (6:45, HD) – The superstar actor chats about coming out of retirement to play Churchill in Inglourious Basterds.
Rod Taylor on Victoria Bitter (3:21, HD) – One more anecdote from Taylor about beer.
Quentin Tarantino's Camera Angel (2:44, HD) – A collection of funny clapper markers.
“Hi Sally” montage (2:11, HD)
Extended and alternate scenes:
Extended Lunch with Goebbels (7:12, HD)
Extended La Louisiane Card Game (2:09, HD)
Alternate Nation's Pride beginning (2:06, HD)
Film poster gallery tour with Elvis Mitchell (11:02, HD)
US teaser and theatrical trailers, international theatrical trailer, and Japanese theatrical trailer


The images on this page are taken from Arrow’s Blu-ray – NOT their 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.
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